What is the ideal of mother or your ideal mother?

Here are a couple of dictionary definitions of ideal to help you with the question:

adjective
1. satisfying one’s conception of what is perfect; most suitable (suitable to you and your needs.)
2 existing only in the imagination; desirable or perfect but not likely to become a reality

noun
3 a person or thing regarded as perfect:
4. a standard of perfection; a principle to be aimed at

Please do yourself a favor and write down your ideal of mother, then comeback and read the rest of this post. Do not describe your mother or yourself as mother. Just think of the ideal, the archetype.

Now review your list. You probably wrote a bunch of adjectives such as nurturing, sensitive, kind, wise, etc.

Now make a list of verbs! What are the actions of mothering?

Mother is the name for the woman who gave birth to you or adopted you. But did she mother you? This is where we run into our upsets and difficulties – not with “mother” but with the mothering.

Mother (father and parent) are nouns/names and VERBS!! Child is always and only a noun and is the object of mothering.

When you review your list of verbs, think of all the people, besides your mother, who mothered you. Make that list and fill your Mother’s Day heart with gratitude for each one.

I am having a special time with someone I mothered a lot when he was growing up and it is a joy for both of us. My son’s best friend has recently moved nearby and he comes over for dinner and long conversations every couple of weeks. I’ve known Michael since he was 7 and now he is thirty!

Is your best friend’s mother one of your other mothers?

Please share your verbs and pay tribute to your other mothers by leaving a comment below.

INNER MOTHER INNER FATHER

Inner Mother Inner Father is going to be one of the most powerful courses I have designed. We will be looking at the core activities of mothering and fathering and how we internalize them or self-mother and self-father our sense of self. We will look at the mothering and fathering we received from a new perspective. The description of the course will be posted in a couple of days.

Inner Mother Inner Father will be eight 90 minute live interactive webinars. It will begin the week of May 28th. As usual I will be offering the program on two different days and times – one evening and one early afternoon Eastern time allowing people from all over the world to participate. It will cost $280 and include recordings of the sessions, great materials, and a 20 minute private session with me.

For Mother’s Day, I want to offer a discount of $60 to all those who email me they are interested in taking the course and let me know what evening (Monday or Thursday at 8PM Eastern) or day (Saturday, Sunday or Tuesday at 1PM Eastern) works best for you. You must email me before 11:55 PM, Wednesday, May 16th to get the discount. I will send all those who have emailed me about their interest a discount code.

You will not be making any commitment. I will be posting the description on Thursday, May 17. If after reading the description you change your mind — I don’t think you will — you are under no obligation.

For those who want to take the course but cannot afford the cost, please email me and let me know what kind of discount or payment plan you would need to participate. I want everyone to take this course as it will be so healing, liberating and empowering. I promise!

I first asked this question of a client who is extraordinary in her commitment to doing, managing and caring for her family and her community. Her self-care is about keeping herself healthy so she can keep going at her amazing pace. I looked at her and asked her if she had a Sabbath consciousness and she asked me what I meant.

Here are my thoughts on Sabbath consciousness.

Sabbath consciousness is the attention and commitment to giving yourself time to rest or to retreat in a very special sense. Rest is passive and retreat is active, both are set apart and both sanctify your existence.

Rest is your holy time of restoration, of stepping outside your active life into quietness, stillness and serenity. Through Holy Rest we repair and refuel our bodies and souls. We stop and do nothing that we have been doing or intend to do. It is a spiritually sweet pause.

Retreat is a quiet time in a secluded place for a sacred activity. A sacred retreat enhances, expands and elaborates our experience of body and soul. A Sabbath retreat is the taking up of a new activity. It is spiritually creative engagement outside the ordinary.
Both holy rest and sacred retreat are spiritual arts and require designing, learning, practicing and developing. You design the forms of rest and retreat that benefit your individual needs and you devote yourself to evolving the forms into their most elegant and meaningful reality.

In this post I want to look at Holy Rest.

DESIGNING YOUR HOLY REST

The first thing that comes to mind when we speak of rest is sleep. Ordinary sleep is not Sabbath sleep and does not provide Holy Rest. Sabbath Sleep or Holy Rest is sacramental, ritualized and special.

Sabbath sleep can be the blink of your eyes when for a sweet moment you leave space and time and enter the spiritual world as a spiritual being and experience restoration. Blink now with Sabbath consciousness knowing you have however briefly entered and rested in spiritual realms. Remind yourself everyday that a blink is a holy rest, it will change your life.

But an extended holy rest requires more attention. It begins with a feeling for and creation of sanctuary and altar. Think how you want to design the sanctuary and the altar for this sacrament of holy rest. Sabbath sleep does not take place in an unprepared room on an ordinary bed at the usual bedtime. (The hotel industry knows this and attracts its customers with a consciousness of the the need we feel to sleep in a sanctuary on an altar although these are pseudo sanctuaries and altars and do not belong to you.)
In the evolution of consciousness we have reached a stage of individuality where we can create are own spiritual practices out of our I-being or higher self. We no longer need gurus, high priests or ecclesiastical authorities. We can choose and shape our places, activities, purposes and meanings without directives from others.

How can you benefit from the practice of Holy Rest?

How often you practice Holy Rest is up to you. Once a week, a month, a season, a year? How long is the rest? 30 minutes, 2 hours, a day? And the time of day I find best is either late morning or mid afternoon when the pull of ordinary sleep is not present.

Must you fall into sleep? Not necessarily, but you will enter the space between waking and sleeping and stay there for a time.

HOLY REST ELEMENTS AND ENVIRONMENT

Imagine gifting your Holy Rest practice with a set of linens, a quilt (oh, do I wish I had the time to design and make a Holy Rest quilt!), a pillow that is never used for ordinary sleep. Do you wear a special garment or gown? Do you keep all your Holy Rest elements in a dedicated closet, chest or basket?

Do you prepare with a bath made with certain essential oils? What is the source of light – the sun, the moon and stars, beeswax candles? How do you shape your silent environment? Should you shut off your electrical power with all the hums and forces it creates and unplug your modem, cable and phones?(You can do this without causing any difficulty.)

I do hope I am inspiring you to take up this practice. I imagine our world to be a better place if enough of us take up the practice of Holy Rest. Even those in terrible situations of poverty or imprisonment can blink with Sabbath consciousness.

MORE THOUGHTS ON HOLY REST

There are certain days when Nature – temperature, light, air, sounds – have a tender configuration that bless rest with a feeling of great spiritual presence. Sabbath consciousness may call you to a spontaneous Holy Rest.

If your time is committed to a job or to young children, your practice of Holy Rest will require more arrangement. Can you take a personal day from work? Can you find someone to care for your children? Would the spiritual rejuvenation from a Holy Rest benefit all that you do and all those you care for?

Holy Rest is not indulgent nor narcissistic, it is transcendent spiritual practice when done with Sabbath Consciousness.

Yes, there is a form of Holy Rest that mirrors the rest of the seventh day in Genesis. This comes with a consciousness of the completion of a creative gesture. You have done something that only you can do. It is done, done well, done with purpose, meaning and significance. Or you have crossed a threshold of inner development and found new freedom or greater love. Or you have thought a profound new thought sparkling with truth. You have formed a moral feeling of glowing beauty. You have become worthy of intimate attention from the spiritual world and you place yourself on your altar of Holy Rest.
You can also use the practice of Holy Rest to sanctify a beginning at the beginning. When you know you are about to take a new initiative filled with sacred intention, first rest with Sabbath consciousness.

Garments are protective and signifying. You can choose a shawl of Holy Rest and keep it with you at work or if you are traveling. Place it over your shoulders which actually is wrapping the shawl around your heart, when you want a few moments of Holy Rest.

For parents…give your child a Holy Rest shawl. If your child sees you using your shawl and coming to a stillness and quiet, s/he will imitate you. You will be giving her/him a simple practice to self-soothe which helps bring beauty to the process of your child’s incarnation.

I do hope I am inspiring you to bring your attention your need for Holy Rest. I have given only simple suggestions. If Holy Rest feels right to you, spend time designing your practice.

Take up the practice of Holy Rest. You are worthy of it and deserve its blessing.

I will bring some thoughts on Sacred Retreat soon.

Please share your comments on Holy Rest.

In my life of conversations, I am always sensitive to the surprise or the gift of wisdom — the moment when I am responding to a question (one that pops up from my heart or is asked by a conversation partner) and a revelation occurs – bringing form to the formless, direction to the wondering/wandering, forgiveness and reconcilliation to oppositions, lifts the veils of appearances, and sometimes just makes sense. And it always feels obvious as if it had always been there, just not seen, heard or felt, or had not come to language until that moment.

I just gave an interview/conversation with Donna Ashton for her International Association of Waldorf Homeschoolers. The wisdom moment came when Donna spoke about her ten-year old twins asking those questions about “babies” and the inner awkwardness of the parent in finding the right response and asked if I could explain the timing and the experience. In spite of inwardly wondering how I could possibly answer the question in a meaningful way, I said two things that surprised me – I’ve italicized them.

I described that a shift in the production of melatonin that occurs in the tenth year had triggered the onset of puberty and that this biochemical activity/awakening of sexual development was initiating a new awareness of and interest in the making of babies.

Then I described the questions as wisdom-seeking, not as curiosity. I write and speak about wisdom and about questions all the time, but never before had I named the questions wisdom-seeking questions. Let’s coin that phrase now as our individual and collective futures depend on our ability to ask wisdom-seeking questions.

Motivating these wisdom-seeking questions is the awakening desire to know what it means to be a person, to understand feelings, make choices, live fully, do good and be authentic. Children want the what, the how, the why, and the mystery to be gently unfolded so the sacred and moral challenges of meaning, purpose and significance can begin to emerge. They don’t want a dogma, they want wisdom.

Kids asking wisdom-seeking questions especially around sex and intimacy truly challenge parental confidence. Parents wonder what the right answer is and usually fall back on yukky facts or yukky vagueness while smiling to coverup anxiety and a little embarassment.

And kids get that parents are uncertain and internalize the experience that asking questions about intimacy and talking about intimacy is difficult.

It’s easier to read books (fiction and non-fiction), watch Hollywood’s versions, depend on google searches, and fantasize. So we stop seeking wisdom about relationships and only seek answers and pleasures and sadly create relationships that are full of drama, conveniences, habits and selfishness, never learning about the mysteries of real intimacy.

A SUGGESTED EXERCISE

Go into your memories and recall your sex education and your intimacy education. What was awakened in you? What was learned? Were there conversations that gave you permission to seek wisdom and that offered wisdom? Did you get what you needed to have fulfilling, evolving relationships? Or do you feel, like I do about my own relationships, that your education about the sacred and profane aspects of intimacy hardly prepared you for the enjoyment, the challenges and the dilemmas of the reality?

What are your areas of ignorance? What are your areas of fantasy? What are the questions that leave you mute, unable to ask? Where have you become resigned or hopeless? Write down your recognitons and observations and sink into them. If you surrender to your suffering and your ignorance, paradoxically, you will cross a threshold into revitalized questions and open up to the generation of wisdom and possibilities.

Please don’t label your relationship experience good or bad — this will block possibility. You need to release all judgment to move to wisdom: you want to observe with compassion. Let me rephrase this. The wise and the wisdom-seekers do not label or judge. They question, observe and note. They do not react. They consider, relate and integrate and question again. Wisdom is not an answer, it is a process of deepening questions.

The Imagine Intimacy program is for wisdom-seekers. You will find guides for forming your questions, making your observations, and transforming your experience of intimacy. You will become a generator of possibilities.

A GIFT

I want to give you a taste of the Imagine Intimacy program. Click here to listen to a 27 minute audio on four essential elements of intimacy. You can download this audio and listen to it with your lover or with your intimate friends.

LISTEN TO THE AUDIO

I invite you to register for the Intimacy program.

REGISTER HERE

I would like to encourage anyone who is considering whether to take this course or not – DO!  Sadly, our culture does not offer a whole lot of support for those of us who are seeking a soul-sized life – and Lynn’s way of working has held the space for me to do my own work of becoming more of who I really am – in ways that are alive and inspirational.  Through these webinars, I can be at home on the remote North Dakota prairie and feel connected to others around the world who are transforming. What a world!
Linda Johansen, Fargo, ND

I also connected more deeply with understanding my work and want to share with you some brief thoughts:

I am passionate about design, design that is logical, comfortable, encouraging to the soul. Design that is beautiful and harmonious enough to guide you to your own inner beauty and harmony.

I devote my work to discovering archetypal structures that allow for the process and the perspectives that lead to healing, liberation, empowerment, and, ultimately, wisdom.

I wildly celebrate questions. Geniuses, whether artists, scientists, thinkers, or connectors, begin their explorations with questions, let go of all assumptions or reliance on the past or single perspectives, and embrace imagination, inspiration and intuition. They then return to their question and as Eliot so beautifully stated

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

Imagination questions ask us to illuminate new thoughts.

Inspiration questions ask us to radiate new feelings.

Intuition questions ask us to enthuse new deeds.

(Do you feel the power of the verb “enthuse,” so much greater than the noun “enthusiasm” or the qualifier “enthusiastic?” Do take the time to look up the definition.)

Each Spring, Nature and Spirit awaken in the soul a celebration of and curiousity about harmonious relationship as we find it in our gardens and in the story of Whitsun/Pentecost. Our feeling life wakes up to the mysteries, the joys and the sufferings of intimately meeting the other.

How do we want to design, structure and question our relationships so that we can feel more alive, more conscious, more safe, more open?

You may long for an inner wisdom about experiencing inmost knowing that is truly tender and tenderly true.

Or you may want to deal with the pain of poor communication, emotional dramas, a broken heart through healing insights.

You might want to find the root of disempowering patterns that seem to show up in every relationship you seek.

Or beyond dramas, you may just want to consider relationship in new ways as connecting with others is such a core experience of finding, knowing and becoming yourself.

The Imagine Intimacy course will not solve your intimacy problems but it will give you the archetypal design, structure and questions, so that you will have the imagination, inspiration and intuition to recognize, organize, evaluate and evolve your intimate relationships.

I’ve done my work so that you can do your work. You can continue to boldly explore your inner realities and transform your outer expressions in ways that support you in being human and becoming I.

Learn about the Imagine Intimacy course here.

Mary Magdalen was at the Crucifixion, witnessing the death, hearing the last words, helped remove the body from the cross, prepared it for burial and attended the entombment, seeing the rock placed over the entrance. Now the next morning she comes with spices to care for the corpse.

Let’s enter into her being for a moment. Was she anguished with grief? Had she slept or eaten? Was her mind overwhelmed by her heart? Was she weeping with sobs of unimaginable sorrow and confusion?

Was she mourning the teacher, the healer, the man, or the god? Or her friend, her savior, her “husband?”

And why is the redeemed prostitute, the woman freed of the seven demons, the one written about on this morning? Is she the only one with the fierce life forces and the unconditional love forces to bear loving witness to the lifeless body?

This Easter morning bring a feeling of the grieving, redeemed Magdalen into your heart. Feel the morning sun around her, knowing she felt no sun rising in her heart and ask yourself:

Easter Sunday Questions

• How does my soul grieve?





• How am was I redeemed by what I so deeply grieve?





• How do I find devotion in my heart, even when I am feeling the deepest loss?

The rejoicing of Easter only comes when we have the resolve to dwell in the deepest grief. Perhaps this is the meaning behind the wisdom “the darkest hour is the one before dawn.”

I urge you to revisit the posts to read the comments and add your own. Share the Easter wisdom of your soul.

In Easter Mystery of entombment we are asked not to imagine the absence of light, but the absence of activity. Imagine the stillness of time, to imagine nothingness.

Saturday is the Sabbath, the day of rest, the day of no activity. In our etheric or life body, there is always activity – blood flowing, cells dying and being born, hormones regulating, digestion creating energy, detoxing, neural impulses executing, breathing, eyes seeing. All these activites occur in time. When the Sabbath occurs in the life body, all activity ceases and time ends, death conquers life.

This is so hard to wrap our consciousness around as even thinking is an activity that takes place over time and in time.

Imagine the final exhale. This is not like holding your breath because along with the holding is the growing desire for the next breath. In death there is no desire for the next breath!

It seems to me, that the first event of Holy Saturday, the question of what must proceed the extraordinary activity of the harrowing of hell, is the complete absence of life, desire, intention, thought, past, present, or future. No memory of the womb, only the finality of the tomb.

It is this stillness, that lasts a momentary eternity, that jolts the spirit free like a big bang in reverse.

I would love to skip over the Entombment, and leap right to Hell. Hell seems like a busy place with lots going on even if it is all suffering.

What are the questions of death and entombment that our living souls can ponder?

Holy Saturday Questions

• When has there been a profound pause in your life?
• When have you longed for a pause? or wanted to never wake up in this life?
• Have you ever stood still and had no memories nor longings? Can you imagine such a state?

Evolution means there are no fixed points, no true beliefs, no everlasting meaning. All evolves. A soul on a path of personal development must give up identities, habits, and stories and that is a truly challenging inner reality.

There is a paradox here. The more we enter into evolution, the more we are able to discern and lift evolutionary veils and glimpse the eternal and absolute. Again I am sharing a concept that rings true to my bones, but I only rarely enter into a living relationship with the experience itself.

We live in fast-changing times, so our external realities are in constant flux – god bless technology and corporate greed because their drive for new applications and new products (both profit driven) are bombarding our perceptions and driving human consciousness to adjust to constant newness, albeit drenched in materialism. As we deal with change outwardly, we find a growing capacity to experience change inwardly and evolve consciously.

Working with Inner Easter, intimately, moment by moment, drinking deep of the cosmic and the human agonies and glories of Easter, we are altered to the core of our developing selfhood.

With Maundy Thursday we experience the darkest night of human consciousness. Now with Good Friday we live the darkest day. The old light had faded and the new light was yet to appear.

As the sunrises on Good Friday bringing a light that had no light, even no love, Jesus Christ is on trial. He faces those bearing false witness about his words and his presence.

Good Friday Questions




Have you experienced others describing you in false ways? What did it feel like?
And when and about whom have you provided false witness? Denied the god within another human being?
Have you, can you forgive false witness?

Here is the link to the compilation of all the gospel recollections:
http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justintaylor/category/holy-week/

Can we spend just a few minutes each day for three days facing our betrayal, our death, our journey into Hell, knowing on the fourth day the sun will rise and something of unknown but great promise will occur?

Inner Christmas is so easy compared to Inner Easter! Nativity and Epiphany are so filled with light, with birth, angels, joyful noises, warm and wise gifts. Inner Easter takes us to a radically more difficult and complex soul experience. See my note.

If you want to read the scriptures, and I suggest you do, get out your Bible or you can go to this evangelical site which has done a compilation of the four Gospels in a timeline that is very helpful.

http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justintaylor/category/holy-week/

Note: As I read the scriptures in preparing for shaping the questions I promised, I was humbled before the task I had set for myself, wanted to bail with apologies, and go back to listening to Wagner’s Parzifal and dyeing some eggs.

Then I realized to find within one’s own soul a living participation in the Easter Mysteries (all that occurs between the Last Supper and the Resurrection) is not a quick and simple deed nor is it dependent on ritual and recollection. It is more like an extended, many year-long, even a many lifetime-long, devotion of many questions, many doubts, many perspectives — all requiring courage. Easter courage – that is something to define and to feel.

In my despair over finding questions, a little nudge came from somewhere, and I remembered the meaning of process, of baby steps, of years of unfolding. I took a breath, felt a sigh, and remembered that this is a gentle beginning. All my work is about guiding a many-year process, not defining or completing or fixing.

Being human and becoming I requires a deep, deep, unfathomable awakening of the Christ Event within your soul. This has nothing to do with being Christian, nor does it exclude or devalue identifying yourself as a Christian in belief or practice. Neither does it exclude or devalue any non-Christian religious identities, belief or practices, in fact this awakening will enrich, strengthen and illumine your spiritual life however you define it. Even agnostics and atheists can find a profound experience of selfhood in these questions.

Finding yourself by yourself within this great, infinitely complex mystery is THE inner challenge and will take much effort, much thought, endless openess.

Each year, I will bring these Easter questions. This is the first set of Inner Easter questions. I will begin with questions at the beginning of each of the Easter “days.” Over the years we will walk slowly and reverently through the unfolding events of each day, making our way to a personal Inner Easter.

You may want to begin an Inner Easter Journal for recording your thoughts and feeling each year.

Questions for Maundy Thursday 2012:

The event of the Last Supper begins with the finding and preparing of the Upper Room.

• Do you know where in your being, your consciousness, your Upper Room is?
• What is your sense of “upper” and “room” when you imagine your soul?
• Remember it is your “I am,” your own inner divinity, that has asked you to find and prepare this room. How do you prepare this inner space for a sacred last gathering and a sacred last meal?

I want to encourage you to respond to these questions with active imagination. Begin with saying from your heart, “Take me to my upper room and show me how to prepare it.” This is not Sunday school and there are no failures or sins here.

The upper room returns again at Pentecost or Whitsun. Asking yourself wisdom-seeking questions about the upper room as an inner place of profound events could not be more important.

Tomorrow we will move to the beginning event of Good Friday.

In the freedom of Inner Easter, you may want to go for the big moments found deeper in the unfolding events: the mysteries of body and blood, the chosen betrayer, Gethsemane, the kiss of betrayal, and the arrest. If you choose to do this, I urge you to begin your contemplation with writing down a question that asks how this aspect of the Easter Mysteries lives in your own soul. Always begin with a written question.

How does Easter live in your heart each year? What is its meaning for you? How do you celebrate this holy time and holy story?

I ask this question of all my readers, whether you are Christian or not. The Inner Year looks to the Christian Year (not the Christian religion) as a model of incarnation – the divine becoming flesh in order to evolve, serve, and transform human consciousness. You and I are incarnations. There is a spark of the divine, a sacred purpose, dwelling within our own flesh bearing an unselfish, full-of-Self purpose that requires us, as Goethe says, to die and become.

Inner Easter asks us to look to the Easter Story, not to worship and believe, but to seek our own Easter imaginations, Easter inspirations and Easter intuitions about our own story, our own incarnating of the divine. This is not a task just for those who define themselves as Christian. It is a task for each of us because we are human and we speak the declaration “I am.”

My Gift to You for Your Inner Easter

I will be sharing with you twelve questions over the four days of Inner Easter. Your answers to these questions will cultivate a moral awareness of personal development, more than a spiritual awareness of the “greatest story ever told.” Rudolf Steiner admonishes us (as human beings, including Christians, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, atheists and all others) to take three steps in moral development for every step in spiritual development.

On Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday, I will send out an email (each day) with three questions for you to contemplate and work with. They will awaken in you an Inner Easter, your own personal, living Easter.

Each post offers suggestions for this deeply profound and personal celebration of Easter. These questions are not religious, dogmatic, or even spiritual, although they reflect the Easter Events and Jesus Christ. Inspired by Christianity, they are universally human in what they provide as possibility for personal development.

The questions will be posted on the Evolving Thoughts blog and I urge you and plead with you to share some of your inner responses to the questions. Selfhood is one of the great paradoxes. The experience and evolution of self is a solitary deed, yet it only finds meaning and proof in how our social gestures appear in the world. I was quite moved when I realized that the Christ is never alone and always in active social engagement. This is why the Inner Year curriculum, based in spiritual wisdom, focuses on the moral development that comes with finding yourself, knowing yourself, becoming yourself in relationship to your incarnating destiny, to others, to the world and to the future. Please leave your comments on the blog.

With every post I receive a number of personal emails with comments and I always wish they were posted on the blog to inspire all the Imagine Self community.

Thoughts on Religious Festivals

For most of us, our religious festivals center around meals more than worship. Our ceremonies take place at dinner tables, not altars. We decorate with symbols that seem more to delight the senses than to bring spiritual significance. They are yearly family rituals rather than times of connecting with the great spiritual mysteries.

Our conversations rarely reflect on the spiritual meaning of the day but focus more on the food and the family and friends gathered. Yet our enjoyment of the food and the company would not take place unless the religious story made the day special and called everyone together.

In the Christian Year and in most other spiritual festival calendars, there are two stories that shape the timing, the worship, and the festivities, the story of the gods and the story of nature. Long before the story of the Son of God, our ancient ancestors gathered together to celebrate the story of the Sun and the turning points of nature.

Considering Easter in 2012, it seems that we have a number of celebrations:

the celebration of Nature
the celebration of the Divine
the celebration of the Senses
the celebration of Relationships

Each of us also celebrates our memories of the festival, particularly from childhood. I still remember the amazing, wonderful, giant chocolate Easter egg my grandfather got me when I was 9 years old. And I remember about the same time, learning the Stations of the Cross and wondering what they were all about.

The Inner Year draws attention to another celebration, the celebration of growing Selfhood or our own moral awareness of self. This is the most challenging and most rewarding of the celebrations for any and every holiday and festival. It asks us to celebrate the sum of our experiences that are revealed by wondering and questioning ourselves from the perspective of the great religious event being recalled.

I explore all these celebrations in my book on Christmas, The Six Ways to Celebrate Christmas! and Celebrate You! If you want to explore the six ways we experience all our holy days, click here.

Do you see or sense it? Probably not. Turning points, no matter how profound are rarely noticeable or obvious. It is a point, a moment, so hard to observe.

You notice when the new reality or relationship has become dramatic enough to get your attention, when you have developed enough consciousness sensitivity to perceive it, or you have the emotional equanimity to not be fearful of turning points.

This is true with all turning points – the ones in nature and the ones in our souls. As I look at turning points, I see the threshold between life and death, death and life. Something in me dies and something new is born – a new perspective, a new form, a new activity, a new relationship.

Think about your personal turning points. Was the turning point an event, an encounter, a new environment?

Look at work, relationship, your sense of self management, or your sense of moral development and write down 3-5 turning points. How did you turn toward growing light or growing darkness? Or what was born into your life of soul, or what died?

Now in reflection, ask yourself the questions that lead to finding yourself, knowing yourself, becoming yourself. “What happened? How did I realize this turning had occurred? Did I miss the point? Was I afraid? Did I celebrate?

Please note that the turning points in your childhood are often painful ones, which may have left you traumatized. To take up a practice of observing your turning points can be healing for these traumas, liberating from biographical limitations and empowering of your resolution of karma and fulfillment of destiny. Understandably you may want to avoid turning points altogether, but they do occur. Find your confidence.

Observing the point of turning as close to the point as possible indicates a highly developed sense of self. Work at this and you will be rewarded with an inner alertness that feels good and right regardless of the nature of your turning point.